Three Strong Women

In the first section of Marie NDiaye's affecting and acclaimed tripartite novel, "Three Strong Women," Norah, a Parisian lawyer in her 30s visiting her father's home in Dakar, Senegal, for the first time in years, cannot recall for certain if she had once rented a house nearby or not.

Her aging father, a self-made millionaire whose fortunes have turned, and a proud and cruel man ("deeply shocked and repelled by ugliness," even in the face of his own daughter), has summoned her after her younger brother, his favorite child, Sony, is imprisoned on a dubious murder charge.

A flood of questions, self-doubts and partial revelations sweeps over Norah as she steels herself to fight, not only for Sony's freedom, but it becomes increasingly clear, for her very sanity as well.

From here on out, a pattern is set: There will be no tidy resolutions or neat transitions in the telling of complicated lives. After a brief, one-paragraph counterpoint, in which NDiaye skillfully elaborates and undermines the preceding story from an alternate perspective, the narrative abruptly shifts to an entirely new setting and cast of characters.

And so, in Part 2, we travel to the French countryside, where we meet Rudy Descas, a white man whose father had ties to the same holiday resort, Dara Salam, that made Norah's father rich.

Rudy is now in his 40s, having returned from Senegal with his black wife, Fanta, and their infant son. It is on a particularly hellacious day that we encounter him, and it is a testament to the sensitivity and depth of understanding NDiaye is able to marshal in his service that we are able to remain for sustained amounts of time inside the mind of such a reprehensible man.

This middle section, in which we only ever see Fanta through Rudy's gaze, is both longer than the other two and psychologically far more tortuous and intense. As much as Rudy represents a kind of Dostoyevskian underground man, wallowing in his own debasement and degradation, the mental gymnastics, recriminations and self-justifying embellishments of the cuckolded protagonist more aptly recall Alberto Moravia's small masterpiece, "Contempt" - right down to the excruciating power dynamic between Rudy and his suave boss, Manille, a well-to-do man's man who, it seems, has had his way with Fanta in the past.

In the third section, we return to Senegal, to the life of a servant girl named Khady Demba, whom we first saw as a teenager in the employ of Norah's father. Khady is grown up now, uneducated, widowed and ever more aware that she, having borne no children, is an unwelcome extra mouth to feed in her husband's family's home.

We follow Khady as she sets off on the desperate and horrific journey out of Africa into Europe. Throughout it all, the only thing that she can rely on is her gradually evolving sense of self.

The links among these three disparate storylines are tenuous at best, but thematically they more than hold together and create a textured whole that is greater than its parts. Early on, NDiaye tells us that "evil can have a kindly face," and it is this theme that resonates throughout.

"Three Strong Women" is a book about betrayal - of ourselves and others alike - as much as it is an examination of forgetting, or more precisely, not wanting to recall, and the lengths to which we'll go to keep the most painful truths concealed - in short, the stories - and lies - each of us tells ourselves and others in order to live. The tenacity with which these women fight to overcome the lies and resist the men who would dominate and betray them, purposefully or not, is the basis of their strength.

NDiaye's prose can at times be complicated and borderline convoluted. She writes in long sentences that double back and digress. After a few pages, however, what at first may have seemed awkward starts to feel hypnotic - the repetitions create momentum, the digressions amass precision.

She is an impressive stylist with a strong voice, which John Fletcher has admirably preserved in this translation. More problematic is the overuse of heavy-handed symbolism relating to plants and birds, and in the case of Norah and Rudy, the too obvious outward manifestation of inward emotional states.

It adds nothing to NDiaye's powerful psychological realism for Norah, an anxious wreck, to have to wet herself repeatedly and publicly, or for Rudy, a man who is certainly hot and bothered, to also be plagued by an insufferable case of hemorrhoids.

But these are minor quibbles in light of so compelling a novel - one that examines bravely and from both sides the collision of Europe and Africa (both as ideas and lived realities) and the significance this collision has had and continues to have on black and white lives.

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